Irit Ballas is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Law, Bar Ilan Univesity. She was also a senior faculty member at the College of Law and Business and a research associate at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford.

Her research focuses on the social, political and historical aspects criminalization of terror and political crimes. Specifically, she is interested in the role of secrecy in the manifestation of state power, emotions in security-criminal law, and representations of crime and punishment in popular culture. Her articles have been published in leading academic journals, including Law & Social Inquiry; University of Toronto Law Journal and Theoretical Criminology.